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ASIC disciplines PWC partner

MARK COLVIN: And David joins me now for the rest of business and finance. A leading accounting firm has had some unwanted attention today?

DAVID TAYLOR: That's right Mark, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ASIC, dealt a blow to PricewaterhouseCoopers today.

Stephen John Cougle is a partner with PWC, he was the lead auditor of the financial reports of Centro Properties Group and Centro Retail Trust, that's now known as Centro Retail Australia.

Now Centro had a lot of debt on its books and was manipulating the numbers, putting the short-term debt onto the long-term books. Now PWC failed to pick up on that. So the partner has now been prevented from practicing as a registered auditor until the 30th June, 2015.

MARK COLVIN: So is it just damage to him or is there a major reputational damage to the company?

DAVID TAYLOR: Well obviously the media reports are saying it's egg on the face for PricewaterhouseCoopers today. But certainly for the lead partner that was involved there, it's not going to do his career any help doing that sort of thing.

MARK COLVIN: So what influenced the markets today?

DAVID TAYLOR: Look there were positive leads from overseas markets that helped local stocks today. There were more budget negotiations between Republicans and Democrats as us Australians went into the weekend. And that did help boost market confidence today.

Also, there are - on a sort of a side issue there are a concern that boards are paying too many dividends at the moment, and they're not putting those dividends back as sort of retained profits, and helping to reinvest in the company.

But Telstra has actually been a beneficiary of those dividends being slightly higher. Telstra today reached a four-year high; up five cents to $4.17.

Energy and healthcare stocks were also doing quite well today. Interestingly enough if those - energy is obviously related to the oil price and the oil price did lift today - but despite that there was a sort of a mixture of both defensive and risky stocks doing well today.

Expecting the market to be fairly quiet though because of the Thanksgiving Day celebrations coming up in the United States.

All Ords up 22 points or 0.5 per cent to 4,382. Looking at commodities markets: gold is trading at $US1722 an ounce; the price of oil's at $US86.67 a barrel.

The Australian dollar has dipped slightly, but managed to gain a little bit of ground today just on the back of those budget negotiations. It's at 103.7 US cents.